Edwin Etieyibo

University of the Witwatersrand | wits · Department of Philosophy

There are forms of discriminations that are not defensible, and unjustified discriminations manifest in different forms. One such manifestation is racism, which involves the use of morally arbitrary natural and moral constituents (characteristics, abilities, qualities) to demarcate racial or ethnic groups and consequently designate some groups as s...

One of the practical ethical areas that Thaddeus Metz applied his Relational Moral Theory (RMT) to is business ethics. In this important area of applied ethics, Metz examines the question of how business owners, and related agents ought to deal with others, especially workers and consumers. He argues that the relational account of obligations recom...

This is the first comprehensive exploration of African ethics covering everything from normative ethics and applied ethics, to meta-ethics and methodology, as well as the history of its evolution. African Ethics provides an in-depth exploration of Ubuntu ethics which is defined as a set of values based on concepts such as reciprocity, mutual respec...

In the last decade or so, some substantive work on disability in Africa has been done. Nonetheless, and this is so for different reasons, the nature and substance of disability in intellectual discourses in Africa still largely remain undefined and uncategorised. In this article, I aim to contribute to the scholarship on disability by examining if...

More recent discussions in African philosophy have focused on substantive issues than the largely meta-philosophical discussions that African philosophers engaged in between the 1960s and 1990s. This makes this special issue very important. Collectively the articles in the issue, among others, explore contemporary topics in African philosophy and s...

Ethnophilosophy is not African philosophy and it is useless and inimical to the growth of African philosophy and should thus be jettisoned – Matolino.

I take the question of the status of culture in African philosophy to be one about the place and foundational role that African culture plays in African philosophy. There are two issues that arise in connection with this claim. One concerns the role that African culture ought to play in African philosophy, and the other is about whether culture-bou...

In this chapter, I begin the first attempt at mapping out what I consider to be the one concept of African ethics and some of its many accounts. I take the one concept of African ethics to be the general idea or notion of African morality and the many accounts to be narrations or versions that try to flesh out this concept. Regarding the one concep...

This volume is a collection of chapters on contemporary issues within African philosophy. They are issues African philosophy must grapple with in order to demonstrate its readiness to make a stand against some of the challenges society faces in the coming decade. Examples of such issues are xenophobia, Afro-phobia, extreme poverty, democratic failu...

One common feature or theme in Confucianism and African philosophy, as we typically find in Chinese and traditional African societies, is that of filial piety. In both worldviews, children are said to be filial or to display the virtue of piety if they act appropriately towards their parents, where acting appropriately includes obedience, service o...

The occasion was the 2nd World Conference on African Philosophy. The venue was the University of Calabar in the beautiful seaport city of Calabar; and the theme: "The State of African Philosophy Today". The rains had set their face on the path of departure, and the growing heat and thirsty winds were announcing the arrival of the dry season. The la...

There is a common view that democracy is the best form of government. Today, most societies have accepted this view as a truism. In Africa, and consistent with this view, there has been numerous moves towards democratising not just society as whole but also various institutions. Although this push is commendable, the form of democracy that is insta...

In Africa, the youth play a major role both as activists and participants in cultural life and politics. Framed around the concepts of conservatisms and radicalisms, this special issue references various African contexts to explore the intersections of youthhood, identities, cultural practices, politics, struggle narratives, education, and marginal...

With the emergence of numerous human rights groups as well as legal instruments in the international arena, the rights and protection of people with disabilities are increasingly being guaranteed. However, in Nigeria, people with disabilities still live at the margins due to some cultural practices that continue to discriminate against them and und...

This paper employs the conceptual-analytical method to analyse literature and news reports on disabilities, and international legal documents and instruments on human rights and the rights of persons with disabilities to which Nigeria is a signatory. This study is conducted in the context of exclusionary and discriminatory practices against persons...

This paper employs the conceptual-analytical method to analyse literature and news reports on disabilities, and international legal documents and instruments on human rights and the rights of persons with disabilities to which Nigeria is a signatory. This study is conducted in the context of exclusionary and discriminatory practices against persons...

There is much to be made from the claim that the notion of the family in African societies (traditional and modern) is significantly different from that typically found in many societies particularly those in the West. Whereas in the former societies the family can be taken to be extended, and that found in the latter societies can be said to be nu...

Human rights are at the center of most world societies today. The traditional assumption has been that they are necessary and universal. However, in light of their universality, there are variations with regard to a conception of human rights that each society has. That is, even if most societies acknowledge existence of human rights, how each soci...

What is the status and nature of the "it" and the ontological progression from an "it" to an "it" in Ifeanyi Menkiti's normative conception of a person? In this article, I attempt to preliminarily give some nuance content to the "it" of childhood and the "it" of the nameless dead. My motivation is straightforwardly simple: to defend Menkiti's claim...

The historically marginalised epistemology that I will be concerned with in this chapter is African Humanism or, as it is commonly referred to in Southern Africa, Ubuntu. To speak of Ubuntu as historically marginalised epistemology is to acknowledge that, qua 'southern' epistemology, its representation or re-translation is so infused with the proce...

In this chapter we begin some empirical legwork into the question in respect of the sort of intellectual progress that has been made by African philosophers or African philosophy following the metaphilosophical debate in the decades past about its existence, nature, and substance. We consider this investigation to be important for African philosoph...

The history of African philosophy is a rich and long one and the debate that began in the 1970s about its nature and existence is one that puts into perspective the different ways of thinking about this history. In thinking about the history of African philosophy there are a number of questions that need reflecting on and attending to. These questi...

This book takes stock of the strides made to date in African philosophy. Authors focus on four important aspects of African philosophy: the history, methodological debates, substantive issues in the field, and direction for the future. By collating this anthology, Edwin E. Etieyibo excavates both current and primordial knowledge in African philosop...

Some have argued that Ubuntu is anthropocentric and that given this ethic and worldview it is unable to promote the ethics of environmental sustainability. In this chapter, Etieyibo pursues two general lines of thought. Firstly, the chapter argues that there is a sense in which Ubuntu can be taken to espouse a non-anthropocentric ethic and worldvie...

In his recently published book Animals and African Ethics, Kai Horsthemke (2015) makes two important and related claims. The first is that most African metaphysical, religious, and ethical positions and perspectives on animals are anthropocentric. Second, he states that if there are one or more principles of duties regarding other animals derivable...

While it is generally believed that moral education is important in the development of children, there is disagreement over a range of issues concerning the teaching of values and morals in schools. In the forefront of this debate are issues concerning whether morality or values and morals can be taught in schools, ought to be taught, and how they...

In this paper, I argue that Ubuntu can be construed as a strict form of cosmopolitan moral and political theory. The implication of this is that the duty or obligation that humans owe other humans arises in virtue of humanity or the notion of human-ness. That is, one is a person insofar as he or she forms humane relations and it is this particular...

In this paper I unpack some nuanced aspects of cultural imperialism against the backdrop of Du Bois’s analysis in The souls of black folk, dealing with the confrontation of African Americans or blacks by the other (the West). My aim is to gesture towards how certain ways of doing African philosophy can be considered culturally imperialistic. I seek...

The position that I defend and argue for in this paper is that we ought to or are obligated to Africanise the philosophy curriculum in universities in Africa. This obligation is grounded on the overarching consideration not to wrong Africans by committing testimonial and hermeneutical injustices against them, and where committing these forms of epi...

It is an honour and indeed a privilege to be the guest editor of this special issue of the South African Journal of Philosophy. I consider this introduction to the issue to be motivated by one principal reason: the need to contextualise the articles that appear in this issue. I believe that such contextualisation will, among other things, highlight...

Background: There is not a lot in the literature on disability in Nigeria concerning the role that religion, culture and beliefs play in sustaining discriminatory practices against persons with disabilities. Objectives: Many of these practices are exclusionary in nature and unfair. They are either embedded in or sustained by religion, culture an...

In this paper I unpack some nuanced aspects of cultural imperialism against the backdrop of Du Bois's analysis in The souls of black folk, dealing with the confrontation of African Americans or blacks by the other (the West). My aim is to gesture towards how certain ways of doing African philosophy can be considered culturally imperialistic. I seek...

The New Africa: Dispatches from a Changing Continent is written by Robert Press and provides a very rich and extensive coverage on the place of the individual in the struggle for political as well as personal freedom in Africa. The book’s leitmotif of human rights and the human spirit in Africa, which runs throughout the book is parsed out into thr...

The conventional understanding takes God to play a pivotal philosophical role in Descartess' epistemological project. Michael Della Rocca disagrees with this interpretation. In a recent article, "Descartes, the Cartesian Circle, and epistemology without God," he forcefully argues for the view that takes God to be peripheral and at the fringe of Des...

Understanding Ethics is a very short book that deals fundamentally with normative ethics. The simplicity and clarity with which the author, Torbjorn Tannsjo, discusses many of the moral theories makes the book very accessible for anyone interested in an elementary or introductory book on normative ethics. Although the book can be said to deal with...

In this paper I examine five essential themes in Brand Blanshard's coherence theory of truth. Blanshard defines truth in terms of the rational or the interdependence of concepts, where concepts determine objects of experience rather than merely conform to them. On this view, truth is contextual and is the approximation of thought to reality or the...

I want to do a couple of things in this essay. First, I want to articulate the central direction that postmodern thinking or philosophy (or postmodernism or postmodernity) takes. Second, I want to present a brief sketch of African philosophy, focusing mostly on some aspects of African ethics. Third, I want to gesture towards the view that while pos...

Bargaining and distribution of benefits accruing from social cooperation are central topics in contractarian accounts of morality or distributive justice in general and David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement (MbA) in particular. In this paper, I raise some problems for MbA both with regards to bargaining over the benefits of social cooperation and th...

Purpose – Like many developing countries, Nigeria embarked on the privatization of many of its state owned enterprises (SOEs) in the late 1980s. Although a number of stakeholders, for different reasons, are opposed to the divesture of many of the country's SOEs, the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), the agency charged with the responsibility of i...

This paper seeks to determine whether or not the divesture of Nigeria’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) by the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) is ethical. Towards this end, it employs an analytic methodology to undertake a conceptual examination of the divesture of Nigeria’s SOEs by the FGN. The paper’s findings are:(1) A large proportion of the...

Privatization—the process of transferring control and ownership (partial or total) of an enterprise, business or agency, or the production of goods and services from the public sector (government) to the private sector—has been defended on different grounds, foremost of which is the view that it would lead to economic growth and efficiency. The Nig...

This article is situated within the context of present discourse on reparations to Africa. It theoretically engages with one kind of the arguments for reparations to Africa for colonialism that have been made by politicalreparationists; namely the moral argument for reparations. The core of the moral argument is that colonialism developed the West...

The debate over the host of moral issues that genetic enhancement technology (GET) raises has been significant. One argument that has been advanced to impugn its moral legitimacy is the 'unfair advantage argument' (UAA), which states: allowing access to GET to be determined by socio-economic status would lead to unjust outcomes, namely, create a ge...

René Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy is his most celebrated philosophical work. The book remains one of the most significant and influential works in epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of mind in the history of Western philosophy. In this paper I examine the relationship between the various hyperbolic doubts, the dreaming, imperfec...